Communication devices such as pagers using present day technology have the capability of receiving content information (e.g., advertisements, news, sports information, and other types of information) besides the traditional personal messages received by pagers. Advanced communication protocols such as the FLEX' communication protocol, developed by Motorola, Inc., supports such advanced features as multi-frequency multi-area paging systems which allow pagers to roam from one geographical area to another.
The FLEX' communication protocol is a synchronous time slot protocol tied to an accurate time reference. Each address in a pager is assigned a base frame in the set of 128 frames appearing on a channel during each 4-minute cycle. FLEX frames are transmitted at 32 frames per minute (1.875 seconds per frame). An hour is divided into 15 FLEX cycles numbered 0 to 14. A discussion of the FLEX communication protocol for example can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,555,183 entitled "Method and Apparatus for Synchronous Selective Call Signal", which is hereby incorporated by reference.
With the advent of such sophisticated communication protocols, service providers are becoming very interested in providing content information such as advertising, news, sports and other types of information to their subscribers. Service providers such as paging service providers see this as an added benefit that they can provide paging subscribers. It is also foreseeable that some service providers may attempt in the future to lower the price they charge subscribers by transmitting advertisements to their subscribers.
As providing content information becomes more popular and therefore more competitive, it will in all likelihood become dominated by a few service providers in a region with the required expertise. Rather than require that all service providers must offer the same high-quality grade of service (and incur the expense), it is realistic to assume that some service providers will sublet service from a particular content provider in their particular geographical region. The benefit is that all frequencies are not unduly burdened with the content information, while the service providers are not burdened with the cost of hiring the staff and managing the information, advertising and content feeds required to provide top quality content information to subscribers (e.g., paging service subscribers, etc.).
The FLEX paging protocol defines two methods of implementing a roaming system. The first method is called SSID (Simulcast System IDentification) roaming and is based on the pager identifying each simulcast area which is to be included in the desired roaming area. The pager contains an RF frequency list and a roaming ID list along with other information required to find and identify each simulcast system. The second method is referred to as NID (Network IDentification) roaming and is based on the pager examining RF channels for the presence of a marker (NID) carried in the address and vector fields indicating that the channel is affiliated with the desired roaming network. This type of roaming is better suited for large, possibly global, coverage areas where it would be impractical to store in the pager every possible Simulcast System IDentification making up the desired total coverage area.
Although multi-frequency pagers and other types of communication devices may be able to scan to one particular advertising/content channel in order to pick up advertisement and/or other types of content information for the subscriber unit, a major problem that exists is that while a pager is roaming to the "advertising channel", it may miss personal messages being sent from its "home" paging system. A need thus exists in the art for a method and apparatus for providing content information, which can solve the above-mentioned problem.